The Lemmings Did Not Kill Themselves, They Were Murdered!
From the “You Learn Something Everyday” department…
I was reading a post on Defective Yeti about urban legends and there was a link in it to this story about how the whole concept of Lemming mass suicides was a myth. In fact, Disney staged a lemming suicide in a 1950’s “nature” film, and that is where the idea of suicudal lemmings came from…
The myth of mass lemming suicide began when the Walt Disney movie, Wild Wilderness was released in 1958. It was filmed in Alberta, Canada, far from the sea and not a native home to lemmings. So the filmmakers imported lemmings, by buying them from Inuit children. The migration sequence was filmed by placing the lemmings on a spinning turntable that was covered with snow, and then shooting it from many different angles. The cliff-death-plunge sequence was done by herding the lemmings over a small cliff into a river. It’s easy to understand why the filmmakers did this - wild animals are notoriously uncooperative, and a migration-of-doom followed by a cliff-of-death sequence is far more dramatic to show than the lemmings’ self-implemented population-density management plan.
The whole article is quite interesting if you are interested in the true lives of lemmings. Oh, and the little buggers are pretty cute to boot.
The article is wrong about the title of Disney film. It’s “White Wilderness”, not “Wild Wilderness”.
http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.htm
Comment by Andrew | 12/27/2004